


Cherry on Top

by Laily



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Humor, Loki (Marvel) Does What He Wants, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:20:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25399051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laily/pseuds/Laily
Summary: Nothing says love like ice cream.Nothing says it louder than sardine ice cream.
Relationships: Loki/Stephen Strange
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49





	Cherry on Top

“You’re kidding me.”

“I kid you not.”

“You’ve lived for so long and never tried ice cream.”

“By the laws of probability, even I know that is impossible. Of course I’ve tried it. I hated it.”

“How many times did you try it?” Stephen was nothing if not persistent.

“Once.”

“When?”

“I had the pleasure of dining with the Chinese Emperor Tang of the Shang Dynasty circa…700 A.D.? He served a dish by mixing ice with flour, buffalo milk and camphor. It was as appetising as it sounds.”

“You can’t knock something you tried once back in 700 A.D.”

“Try 90 over times. That’s the number of attempts it took his ice-mixers to please the King’s palate.”

Loki’s hand ghosted over his stomach at the ghastly memory. “I had to sit through every single one. My gut never quite recovered until Father conquered Iceland and brought skyr back to Asgard some one thousand years ago.”

“Aww.” Stephen reached to tease a lock of hair out of Loki’s haunted eyes. “Thank Odin for yoghurt, huh.”

“Yes...” Loki’s voice trailed. He watched as a father herded his band of children into the ice-cream parlour. Their excited chatter could still be heard through the door as it closed behind them. “I suppose Father did love me at one point in my life.”

_Here we go again._

“Loki.” Stephen laid a stern hand on his intellectually gifted (if not selectively forgetful) lover’s shoulder. “Your Father loved you. Your Brother loves you. _I_ love you.”

Even the Cloak lifted off Stephen’s back, spreading its arms wide behind Stephen’s shoulders and mimicking a great big hug. “See?”

Stephen circled his thumb comfortingly into the tense knot of muscles where Loki’s neck met his collarbone. “Okay??”

Loki smiled. He was quite enjoying all the random love proclamations he’d been getting this lifetime around. “Okay.”

“Now. Choose a flavour. My treat.”

“What’s the occasion? Why are there so many people?” Loki wrinkled his nose. “It’s not Valentine’s Day again, is it? This place is very pink.”

Stephen laughed. “No. It’s just Baskin-Robbins and as it happens, today is the 31st.”

“The significance of the date escapes me.”

“They have a special discount every 31st of the month, to commemorate their original 31 flavours or something.”

“Oh dear. However will I choose,” Loki said dryly.

“Go classic. Can’t go wrong,” The ever-helpful guide to wholesome Midgardian living suggested. “I’m having vanilla myself.”

“Yes,” Loki drawled. “You do have the most adventurous palate.”

“Says the guy who ate marmalade for three days straight in a show of protest just because the bakery stopped selling soda bread.”

“I hate picking out the flaxseed, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and whatever rubbish you choose to put in your so-called bread.”

“It’s healthy!”

“It’s tampering,” Loki glowered. “It’s rubbish.”

“Is that why you eat your sandwiches like a child?” Stephen wondered aloud, the aghast expression on his face of one who had just discovered something important about somebody important that should have been discovered a long time ago. “First the tomatoes, then lettuce, the cheese, and finally the bread?”

“Yes!” Loki gave him an annoyed look. “The sensory overload from eating everything all at once gives me a headache. I hate headaches, they make me cranky.”

“Umm...isn’t that like your default setting though?”

Loki bared his teeth. “Will you get your ice cream and get us out of here? You’re holding up the line. You know it makes me feel like stabbing somebody when people give me dirty looks.”

 _“I’m_ holding up the - ?” Stephen shook his head in exasperation.

He too could be just as stubborn if he so chose. “If I’m getting one, you’re getting one. If you won’t pick a flavour, I’ll pick one that I think you might not hate so much.”

With a dramatic sigh, Loki reluctantly inched closer, secretly applauding himself like he always did every time he succeeded in riling up his cool-as-a-cucumber (usually) human boyfriend. “Fine.”

“You like coffee.” Stephen prided himself on being quite passable at making educated guesses. “Jamoca Almond Fudge? No, you’d only pick out the almond bits and make a right mess. Coffee Coffee Chip?”

Loki read the small placard and wrinkled his nose. “It’s got espresso chips in it. That’s even worse than nuts. They’d get caught in my teeth, like that one time you got us that cheap coffee grinder.”

“It was on discount!”

“And that is the end of romance as we know it,” Loki said mournfully. “A love story right out of Extreme Cheapskates.”

Stephen sighed loudly. He should choose something safe then. “How about Very Berry Strawberry?”

“Strawberries...” A forlorn look fell over Loki’s downcast eyes. “Mother loved them.”

_Maybe not._

“Moving on.” Stephen pulled him along. “Hokey Pokey? Love Potion? Cotton Candy?”

“I refuse to subject myself to a consumerist society that delights in infantilely-named products.”

Bringing Loki here was a bad idea. Stephen knew that now.

_You win some, you lose some, Strange._

Just as Stephen was about to take themselves out of the growing queue, Loki stabbed a finger into the glass enclosure of the ice cream counter. “I’m drawn to that one.”

“Mint chocolate?’ Stephen said, doubtful. “It’s loaded with chocolate chips.”

Loki shrugged. “At least they’ll melt in my mouth. And green’s my favourite colour. Anything green should taste good.”

“That…is a sweeping generalisation but whatever you want, babe.” Stephen offered the girl behind the counter an apologetic smile. “Two regular cones, vanilla and mint chocolate, please.”

The girl barely concealed her sigh of exasperation at such a boring order relative to the amount of time spent deliberating. “Any toppings?”

Stephen shook his head. “No…no toppings. No tampering.”

“Uh-uh. That’s $3.40 altogether.” Money and ice cream could not have exchanged hands any faster. “Napkins are over there. _Next!!”_

A few minutes later,

“How is it?” Stephen pressed eagerly. “It’s good, isn’t it?”

Loki gave his cone another slow, all-rounded lick. He gave a half-hearted shrug, _meh_.

He may have braced himself for it, but Stephen felt the sinking of his heart anyway. “You don’t like it.”

“I don’t love it,” Loki agreed, licking his lips with a green-coated tongue. “But I don’t exactly hate it, either. It’s very…refreshing.”

“Yeah?”

Loki nodded. “It’s like eating frozen toothpaste. And it’s definitely better than the gut-destroying buffalo ice cream I had back in ancient China.”

He took one look at Stephen’s crestfallen face, and suddenly the ice cream was not the only thing melting like putty.

Loki leaned in to give him a soft, sweet kiss on the lips. “The company’s a million times better too.”

Stephen still looked mighty unsure, so Loki kissed him again for good measure. “Thank you.”

He licked his lips to savour the taste of Stephen while it was still cold, “Your vanilla isn’t half-bad either.”

The smile Stephen gave him in return was worth it. “I love you, you know.”

“I know.” Of course Loki knew, deep down in his heart of hearts. Why else was Stephen going to all this trouble sharing the sweetness of the simple life with him?

“You don’t have to finish it.” 

“Oh, thank goodness.”

With a sweet, small laugh Stephen gently prised the cone out of Loki’s hand, and proceeded to clean Loki’s fingers one by one with a napkin.

“I wish you would do that with your lips,” Loki murmured.

“I know,” Stephen said, his eyes glinting with mischief, but his mouth was pursed into a pout. “But now you owe me $1.70.”

“Can $1.70 get me a can of sardines? No, fresh ones, preferably?”

Stephen frowned. He must have heard Loki wrong because he could swear Loki had said – “Sardines?”

“Yeah,” Loki said enthusiastically. “Have you ever heard of The Faraway Tree?”

“The Faraway Tree,” Stephen echoed. “It sounds familiar…”

“Mother brought the series back from Midgard sometime in your last century because I was running out of things to read. I’ve always wondered if the Folk of the Faraway Tree were real.”

Stephen's heart began to pound. He vaguely remembered his own mother reading the Enid Blyton classic to him a long, long time ago, and he had a feeling where this surreal conversation was going, and he was not liking it, not one bit.

“No, they’re not real, Loki. They’re definitely, really, absolutely not real.”

“Ooh, remember the Land of Treats?” Loki’s eyes lit up like gems. “Mother used to give me whatever I wanted, any treat that I could think of asking – except for sardine ice cream, because we didn’t have sardines back in Asgard and Mother didn’t know what they tasted like.”

“They’re yucky. They’re very, very yucky.”

“Thor told me they taste like kippers.” Loki cocked his head quizzically. “We had kipper rolls when we were exploring the Northumberland coast, you said you liked them.”

“Yes, but not in ice cream form!" Stephen was sweating bullets now. He’d seen Loki go into one too many cooking frenzies, and was seriously fearing for his safety now.

“Can’t be worse than edible toothpaste.”

“I assure you, Loki, it is worse.”

“Don’t knock it until you try it. Come on, let’s go to the seafood market, I’m sure they can give us discounts at this hour. You love discounts.”

Somehow the idea of discounted fish was far less palatable than discounted ice cream. Stephen tried to appeal to Loki’s sense of self-preservation one last time, for the sake of both their guts. “Loki…”

Loki was practically skipping now. “Wong’s got an ice cream maker, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind us borrowing it.”

“Oh, he got that from Cuisinart, it’s very, very expensive, I don’t think we should use it.”

“So I’ll just use my amazing Jotunn powers instead.”

“Umm…” Stephen racked his brain. _Think, Strange, think!_ “I think the seafood market’s closed. It’s only open in the morning.”

_Saved!_

Loki shrugged. “So let’s just catch some.”

_Or not._

“Now where does one catch sardines this time of year? Sardinia?”

Stephen sighed. “Coastal North America is the closest.”

“Oh, this is so _exciting!”_ Loki wrapped his arms around Stephen’s shoulders and squeezed tightly. He peered closely at Stephen’s face, all minty-breathed and glowing with excitement. “Isn’t it, love?”

A chuckle escaped. Then another. And another.

Soon, Stephen was doubled over, caught in paroxysms of laughter in a crazy mix of self-pity, sweet surrender and a whole lot of love.

Whoever said that the sense of adventure was contagious had definitely known a Loki in his life.

 _And I’m the luckiest man in the universe to have found you,_ Stephen decided as he circled an arm around Loki’s neck to pull him in for a long, deep, vanilla kiss.

"Stephen?" Loki uttered breathlessly once they broke free for air. "Are you alright?"

“Never better." Stephen planted one last quick kiss in between Loki's eyebrows. "Come on. Let’s go fishing.”


End file.
